Why is that an okay situation to be in? Given things floods, dirty bombs, etc. have a non-zero chance of happening, shouldn't cities, states and countries have the infrastructure to perform mass-evacuations if necessary?
You have to weigh the death toll of the evacuation against the death toll of the disaster.
We see the flooding issue right now--an evacuation would have killed far more people.
A dirty bomb? Once the bomb goes off you will have plenty of time to evacuate where you need to. Keeping radioactivity contained would be more problematic than removing people.
A biological agent? You want to quarantine rather than evacuate.
A fire? San Diego showed how to deal with that--phased evacuations ahead of the actual fire path.
Earthquake? Well, once it's done you have plenty of time to evacuate.
I can't really think of anything that would affect something the size of Houston simultaneously.
Enormous compared to what? We spend 3.2 trillion a year on Medicare, which is 9.9K a person [1]. Imagine if just 1K per person per year (300B) was spent on infrastructure every year to make mass evacuations over a few days possible. Imagine how great normal day to day travel would be once that is in place, city by city.
No, we don't. As your own source says, it is only $646 billion on Medicare, and $3.2 trillion a year in total combined public and private healthcare expenditures.
> Imagine if just 1K per person per year (300B) was spent on infrastructure every year to make mass evacuations over a few days possible.
Then it still probably wouldn't be enough, and we'd get a lot more value for nearly doubling infrastructure spending [0] if we spent it on something else.
We see the flooding issue right now--an evacuation would have killed far more people.
A dirty bomb? Once the bomb goes off you will have plenty of time to evacuate where you need to. Keeping radioactivity contained would be more problematic than removing people.
A biological agent? You want to quarantine rather than evacuate.
A fire? San Diego showed how to deal with that--phased evacuations ahead of the actual fire path.
Earthquake? Well, once it's done you have plenty of time to evacuate.
I can't really think of anything that would affect something the size of Houston simultaneously.